


Piano Hands

by foreverhalffull



Category: Cormoran Strike Series - Robert Galbraith, Strike (TV 2017)
Genre: Barclay can't figure them out, But neither can they, F/M, Fluff, what was Robin doing all this time?!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-05
Updated: 2020-08-05
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:28:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25737313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foreverhalffull/pseuds/foreverhalffull
Summary: Just a fluffy, reminiscey lunch break to address the fact that there are roughly FIVE YEARS of Robin’s life unaccounted for in canon?!
Relationships: Robin Ellacott/Cormoran Strike
Comments: 13
Kudos: 37





	Piano Hands

**Author's Note:**

> Okay I may have missed some things or just be generally shit at math (this is a confirmed fact but I think I’ve done this math correctly), but if Robin’s attack happened sometime around age 20-21, that would’ve been 2004-2005, and we know it took her about a year to venture out of the house, be able to accept touch, etc, but then I don’t think we’re ever told anything she does, other than the driving course, between then and late February 2010 when she moves to London?!? I know she at one point worked in a dress shop in Harrogate but the description of it as a Saturday job gave me the impression it was something she did before university. 
> 
> Please do let me know if there’s stuff I missed because this has been massively bugging me! I eventually came to the unsatisfactory conclusion that this time-lapse may have been a side effect of working their life timelines out to have a respectable/non-creepy age gap and give length to Robin’s relationship with Matthew? But then it would seem uncharacteristically amateurish of JK to have left this time unfilled, so maybe there’s some reveal down the line or (the obvious answer) I’ve just fully missed some things.

A laugh sounded from the inner office, uncharacteristically high-pitched and giggly. Whispers followed, inadequately hushed.

Sam Barclay rolled his eyes. It was the same show every lunchtime, were they all in the office at once. An admittedly rare scenario, but it had played out with such choreographed precision each time that he didn’t need loads of repetition to map – and time – out the scenario.

Since he’d been taken on full-time, a new desk had been moved into the inner office for Robin, and he’d overtaken her old one out by the kitchenette, though whoever had a client appointment often reclaimed it here and there for secretarial tasks. As he moved from the front desk to the row of pegs by the door for his coat, he caught a glimpse of them in the exact position he’d imagined, or maybe pulled subconsciously from his memory.

A chair had been pulled up to Robin’s desk, but it was she who sat in the straight-backed guest chair and Strike in the larger and more supportive, leather rolling chair behind her desk. This was so Ellacott could sit in her amusingly un-prim lunchtime pose, with her feet atop the desk. Sam had been present for Cormoran’s ungodly roar when she’d first tried this at his desk, protesting her dirty shoes mussing his neatly organized files and notes. She’d rebutted that the shoes hadn’t even been on the street outside all day and thus couldn’t be that dirty, a claim which had prompted Barclay and Hutchins to share a raised-eyebrow glance but no comment.

Sure enough, they were now positioned thusly, with sandwiches in their right hands and left hands clasped together in his lap. 

Sam grinned exasperatedly as he jogged down the stairs to meet Strike’s smelly IT friend. (“Smelly” was a value-neutral adjective, as the bloke always smelled strongly, just sometimes of body odor and when in the office, of the excessive body spray that characterized Barclay’s own memories of early adolescence.) 

He was happy for his bosses, as odd as it sometimes was for he and Hutchins to witness the little bits of the senior partners’ private lives he suspected they weren’t intended to be privy to. The slight awkwardness of those moments (exacerbated often by their unmentionable nature; as far as he was aware Strike and Robin had never explicitly addressed with one another that they were more friendly than friendly coworkers and as such he and Hutchins were far at the back of the queue for analyzing workplace relations boundaries) was a great improvement to the brisk office environment he’d found when first hired. 

He’d been confused, surprised, and unable to get much helpful dirt out of Hutchins, as to why the Strike he’d always known to be work-focused but interpersonally blithe and grudgeless had cultivated the tensest working team he’d ever encountered, even from his experience of painters who mostly bitched about their wives and of being court marshalled by Strike himself in the Army.

He still wasn’t sure, in fact, what had been afoot then but quite preferred the Strike without the stick up his arse, and the happier Ellacott who reminded him of his sister up north now that she wasn’t so thin and terse. 

Robin heard the office door slam shut, somewhere in the one far back corner of her mind that wasn’t occupied by Cormoran’s hand running each of her digits between his thumb and forefinger, down the row toward her pinky and back again.

“You have such dainty, long fingers,” he mused. “I thought when you were a temp that maybe you played piano, but there’re no calluses.”

“Mmm. More Stephen’s thing than mine, but we had a piano for his lessons and I picked it up a bit when I was home from university.”

“Did he teach you?” It was this particular, aimless conversation Strike found most relaxing and enjoyable about their lunch breaks. Nothing to puzzle out, to gain or lose, to worry over. Just Robin.

“Nah, he’d left home by then, but Jon and Martin were both home still at first, till Jon left that year for uni and then it was just me and Martin. He had a bit of a band going at the time; he was a drummer, and their keyboardist dipped so he roped me into it.”

“No bloody way? Robin Venetia Ellacott in a pub band?” His chuckle resonated deeply, and she cut her eyes at him.

“Not so rowdy as your mother’s lot, but yeah. Our parents were majorly opposed to it, as I’d only really been out with my female driving instructor in broad daylight and to the shops once or twice, and they thought being in a dark club with lots of men present would’ve been a trigger. Which, if I’d thought it through, I probably would have agreed, but Martin said he needed me and for a while it hadn’t really felt like I’d been needed at all, cos I’d flaked out on my course, flaked out on my uni friends, the lot.”

Cormoran thought “flaked out” sounded like a suspiciously twatty, Matthew-esque turn of phrase, and wondered if it was an opinion Robin had really had of herself or whether it had been written over the surface of her memory after the fact.

“But it ended up being the perfect thing; I was in the back by Martin so people weren’t looking at me too much if the lighting was bad enough and no one could have gotten to me, given the singer and guitarists and cables and things in front. So it got me out but not in contact with people, and eventually we’d stick around after the shows and stuff and I got better. And it was loads of fun, though I reckon my tempo was shit.”

“You’ll have to play for me sometime and I’ll let you know. I’ve got enough unwilling groupie experience to be worth my salt as a judge.”

She swatted at his hand, the exact flustered but amused reaction he’d been hoping to provoke from her. “Absolutely not. I never even played for Stephen, if he knew what he was doing it would be obvious I didn’t. Plus we mostly just played four chords songs, nothing too exciting for me.”

“Hmm.” Without his conscious thought or approval of the action, Cormoran’s left hand had somehow moved from his lap to rest on Robin’s stocking-clad shins on the desk in front of him.

“What else did you do? If the driving course was the first step, and then your pub band days, what next?”

She indulged his sarcastic exaggeration of the hobby, rolling her eyes. “Well in our pub band glory days, me and Mart rescued Rowntree, found him in the car park at the supermarket as such a teeny little thing. We were chuffed cos we’d only been able to have sheepdogs as kids, not proper pets. So I trained him mostly since he was still in school, and it was fun to apply some of the psychology courses I’d taken. It’s kinda controversial, but lots of early human psych discoveries were first translated over from animal studies like Pavlov’s.”

“And that got you right prepared to deal with the clients like Mad Dog, heh?” 

She laughed. They’d named the client for his mad obsession of fixating on one romantic partner, panting after her and demanding she be trailed, her fidelity proven until a shadow of a doubt arose, at which point he moved right along to the next woman and pursued her just as doggedly. How he found the stream of women, they had no idea, but it had become a much-loved game between Corm and Robin to come up with the most outlandish hypotheses.

“Wasn’t exactly how I planned to apply the education, but it was a nice perk to get him housetrained so fast.” 

She remembered a joke Ilsa had made about the lessons applying to men when Robin had given her tips for the kittens, but wasn’t sure her partner was the proper audience. She and Cormoran strictly avoided all allusions to romance. She couldn’t tell who’d begun the policy or when, but neither was keen to topple the precarious balance between them.

His hand began gently treading up towards her knee and back down to her ankle. Sandwich now finished, she tied her hair back distractedly as she continued.

“Then I taught horseback riding lessons to primary school kids for a bit, at my neighbor’s stables. I was meant to be caring for the horses, again, a step before direct contact y’know, but they had to let a teacher go for yelling and spooking a mare with a child on ‘er, and all the kids got on with me cos I’d give them apples and carrots as treats to befriend the horses, so…

“That was a big thing, having a real schedule and being out and about full-time. It made me feel like less of a bum when Matt was graduating and getting certified as an accountant an’ all, that I at least had something I was doing.” 

She worried her lip, and Cormoran reminded himself he absolutely, most definitely did not want to replace her teeth with his own. Not one bit. Except that he did sometimes, and they did sometimes, but neither had ever explicitly acknowledged that the things which happened on Fridays after the Tottenham or Saturdays after curry nights, or some random Tuesdays or long stakeouts or nearly any time or place except their working hours in the office, weren’t businesslike. But his attention was recaptured when she began to speak again.

“I’d kind of thought I was done recovering then, though I’d studied enough to theoretically know that was bullshit. Recovery doesn’t just end,” she glanced over at him, a mutual recognition of the lifelong recovery processes each of them bore daily. “But I felt done, so I started back my degree with the Open University, thinking I could do it so long as I wasn’t on a campus or anything, as that was the main trigger keeping me from going back to Manchester.”

“I didn’t know you ever went back –”

It was evident from her crestfallen, downtrodden expression that there was a reason he hadn’t heard of her second run of university, that it didn’t bring back good memories. He squeezed her shin in support and reached over her legs for the packet of crisps they hadn’t yet eaten. Opening it, he shook some out into his palm and then passed it over to his partner.

She munched softly as she continued. “First content module was on assault response psychology. I just shut down somehow, and that setback was almost worse cos I’d built myself up to feel healed and capable and then it really seemed so objectively true that education and accomplishment just weren’t for me. And then Matthew asked me to move down, and it felt like so much of a lifeline, I…”

Her left arm, the one not occupied by routing salt and vinegar crisps from bag to mouth, had been dangling off her chair between them. She placed it on his waist now, almost below her because of her reposed angle, and her thumb made miniscule circles on his button up, so small he was sure he wouldn’t have sensed them except that it was her, and the electric current between them never shut off. 

“That felt like a lifeline, Cormoran, but… Four weeks later, Temporary Solutions gave me the real lifeline. I’d thought my recovery ended years before, but it was having a purpose, here, that really helped me to heal.”

Her eyes twinkled, but not with tears nor mischief. Something familiar but unidentifiable. Cormoran was quite sure nothing existed outside of their firmly fixed gazes.

When the door to the outer office banged open, it startled them both out of who-knew-what, Robin gasping and dropping a crisp into her lap. Spanner and Barclay (who’d known, when he smelled the undeniable whiff of secondary school gym class, that the younger man would find some excuse to drop by Denmark Street) were standing just outside Strike and Robin’s office.

Though Robin knew they were nearly the same age, with his near-uniform of headphones, hoodie, baggy jeans and banged-up trainers, it was nearly impossible not to view Spanner as younger. He looked crestfallen at the obvious level of comfort between his beloved and hers.

Strike tried his best to be neither amused nor ape-like, territorially proud. He plucked the fallen crisp from Robin’s lap and plopped it into his mouth.

“Spanner, mate! Nick told me you may drop by today, what have you got for us?”

Robin swung her legs around to place them on the ground, not wanting to be in such an unprofessional position with their not-quite-contractor present. Normally the move would have been simple and fluid, but given that they had guests, she couldn’t swing her legs around toward the door without offering a view up her skirt, so she had to slide them down the other way, which depended on Cormoran sliding back from the table to release them from his lap. It took an uncouth amount of time, and at least three taps to the outside of his thigh, but eventually he did. 

Robin stood and smoothed her clothes, casting vinegary crumbs to the floor in her wake and hoping her stare at the ground would seem like an appropriate amount of care over the state of her skirt, rather than its true purpose, which was to hide her blush.

“Tea?”

**Author's Note:**

> I've been massively struggling with interjecting joy and just general non-angst into Cadet, which has been made more difficult by the fact that the chapter I'm currently writing and the next are the least developed in my outline, so when this idea popped into my head I thought it may be a helpful exercise! I wasn't super pleased by a lot of the dialogue as getting it in-character-feeling is not my strong suit, but hopefully practice makes perfect!


End file.
